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The scent of memory

But work with me first. How do you
describe the smell of rain to someone? Or the scent that rises from a drawer
full of fresh but worn bed linen when you first open it? I have been trying to
capture the smell of my dad’s black donkey jacket, the one he wore to work in
the 1960s. When he came home from his shifts at the steelworks he hung it under
the stairs in the porch. The closest I can get is ‘a mixture of oil and cold
weather and the inside of a lorry cab’.

Tony bought some cheese a couple
of weeks ago, two white stiltons, one with chopped mango the other with
blueberries. I couldn’t eat the first one: it tasted like tomcats to me. ‘I
know what you mean,’ his daughter said. Not that either of us, please believe
me, have tasted any part of a tom cat but there was something about the
acidity, the sourness, that automatically conjured the image in my head. Or in
my mouth.

There’s a poem by Kate Clanchy
called, 'Poem for a man with no sense of smell’ that closes with:

I can try and articulate why that
makes sense to me, but it feels right before I even begin to think about
it. Intimacy and fragility: there’s a connection there.

I can’t imagine anyone without a
sense of taste wanting to try the stilton with mango after I tell them it
tastes like tomcats! But maybe they would want to try the easiest Thai green chicken
curry in the world if I told them it tasted like mini lightning bolts trapped
in a silk scarf, or like the heat that makes your foot tingle when you first
step into a bubble bath, the sparkle of foam.

I served it on a bed
of steamed shredded cabbage and ribbons of carrots which I’d sprinkled with
some crushed cumin and fennel seeds during the cooking time. The flavour of
that worked perfectly with the Thai blend of ingredients. Would the curry have
been better if I’d started with all the ingredients from scratch rather than
using the paste? Possibly. Probably. But sometimes cooking is like sending an
email to an old friend rather than a long letter to your great aunt. Comfy and
quick with the shorthand you can use with someone who knows you well. And the
ready-made paste was my shorthand.

Thai Green Chicken Curry (courtesy
of Blue Dragon)

1 tbsp oil

¼ jar of paste

400 ml of coconut milk (there’s a
half-fat version out now)

2 chicken breasts, thinly sliced

1 pepper thinly sliced (or mix up
different colours as I did)

Heat the oil in a pan and fry the
paste for 2 minutes. Then add the coconut milk and mix in well. When it’s hot
add the chicken and pepper and simmer until the chicken is cooked through.
Coriander is pretty on the side and you can always have rice with it if you’re
not into cabbage. The sound of the word isn’t great, I have to admit. Cabbage?
What does it sound like?

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